CuBERT [1]} showed that pre-training on a generic corpus of Python code can improve the detection performance on variable misuses. However, the authors employed mutants instead of real bug fixes in the fine-tuning phase. In contrast, RealiT  is pre-trained on mutants and then fine-tuned on real bug fixes. A combination of these two approaches by applying RealiT  on top of a pre-trained model would be interesting and we leave this open for future work.
